Jambo!

It is my hope that you have had nice time during Easter period.

On my side, this Easter was so nice and well celebrated, but you know what? It was when colleagues in the office, people at Church and home when I realized that a quarter of this year is already gone…indeed it is. Sometimes with a busy schedule like ours in TFFT is very difficult to see days passing by; however, despite the fast moving year at hand, lots of accomplishments are happening within our scholarship program.

As most of you read on Uswege’s blog about OVC identification and selection, this exercise was our first direct step to selection from the community rather than only from our partner orphanages. The process enriched us with a substantial experience with the fieldwork and also opened our eyes to the most needy children out there that are striving for their rights to quality education. We went from village to village, ward to ward, district to district witnessing the hardships and challenges most of the community kids go through. We finally were able to come up with ten most vulnerable children out of many who applied and those directly identified by TFFT.

Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Mathayo, Madeliny, Baraka, Upendo, Fatuma, Abednego, Raphael, Janeth, Salim and Petro. These are our new scholars for 2014.

Here are some of the new #facesofTFFT (Mathayo, Raphael, Salim, and Petro not pictured)

While continuing with the OVC selection process, we were also celebrating the success of our form 2 scholars, who all passed their national examination with flying colors and joined form 3 this year. On top of that, two of our scholars were the top performers in physics and English subjects in their school, one of them scoring 97% in physics making TFFT shine like never before in their school.

Apart from that, our scholars who graduated form 4 were attending the computer course to keep themselves up to date with the digital world. Just in the midst of their course, we were overjoyed by the news from the National Examination Council of Tanzania that all 7 of our scholars who graduated form 4 last September passed their national examination with points that allow all of them to go for further studies.

In fact, one of them (Richard Augustino) is already in school due to his exceptional performance which allowed him to join high school in the Cambridge Curriculum with the Arusha Modern Schools majoring in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Geography on his way to becoming a pilot. The rest of the form 4 graduates are waiting for their schools to open.

Currently, all of our primary school scholars are on their school break until May 4, 2014. I am hoping to be back soon after the school opening, stay good, live responsibly and take good care of yourself, tchao!

P.S. Confused on the Tanzanian school system and want to understand it better? Meghann wrote a great post explaining it back here.

P.P.S. We’re 43% of the way to our Annual Fund goal! Will you help us make it to 100%?!